OK so apparently the narrative of the Orphic cosmogony which presents humans as having come from the ashes of the Titans and that we are partly evil or sinful because of that heritage, resulting in something equivalent to original sin, is not really attested in ancient sources.
(Tearing Apart the Zagreus Myth: A Few Disparaging Remarks on Orphism and Original Sin by Radcliffe Edmonds)
Turns out you won't find anything resembling original sin in any versions of the Orphic cosmogonic narrative before 1879, when some gold tablets were discovered in Thurii and Domenico Comparetti interpreted them as containing a myth of humans being created from titanic ashes and inheriting sin. OK so apparently the narrative of the Orphic cosmogony which presents the human species as having come from the ashes of the Titans and that we are partly evil or sinful because of that heritage, resulting in something equivalent to original sin, is not actually attested in ancient sources.
Right, so, with the timeline on the Zagreus original sin anthropogony established, that means a lot of writing about the Orphic Mysteries has to be taken with a grain of salt. Not valueless or useless, but all too often influenced by ahistorical products of 19th century Christian scholarship. The way "purity" is discussed depends very much on the notion of ritual purification as a means of cleansing the inborn sin or guilt inherited from titanic soot, and that idea was created by people who tried to interpret "Orphism" as a precursor to Christianity.
Two biases are at work with this idea, both Christian. The first is the idea that Orphism contrasts with older forms of paganism as "genuinely" religious, because of the idea that only rational cults of purification and redemption can be "religions". The other is the same old perennialist impulse. In other words the desire to see Orphism as a precursor to Christianity (let alone Protestant Christianity) is the same as the desire to confirm Christianity as the primordial, universal religion behind all religions. "Orphism" in this view would be seen as just an early, incomplete Christianity. That church fathers such as Augustine compared Orpheus to Jesus, regarding Jesus as "completing what Orpheus began", is itself an example of this view, thus testifying to the bias of people like Comparetti and his many contemporaries as the old bias of Christian perennialism.
But from that standpoint, ethical and spiritual purity is a theme that can can diminish in a much larger picture. And that picture is Dionysian/Bacchic mystery at large. Burkert establishes that there is not one Orphism but multiple Orphic mysteries, not all of them built on the same foundation. I think the notion of attaining kinship with the gods, and thereby liberation from the constraints of the world, including social order and hierarchy, is more important than purity or much of the other themes inherited from 19th century scholarship. And I think that brings us back to Dionysus. After all, Dionysus' mysteries and cult welcomed people from all walks of life and presented, in the mystery, a religious way to overcome or transgress the limits of the society they lived in, and dissolve its apparatus of repression. Since "Orphism" is linked to that, we should dive deep.
